Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday November 11, 2009 @12:12PM
from the watch-me-dance-computer dept.

scruffybr writes "Today the first information about the pricing and launch of Microsoft’s Project Natal has emerged. The pricing for the hardware will be much much lower than many had anticipated, coming in at around £50 when sold separately from the console. The idea being that it’s low enough that people will purchase on impulse."

I think you will see more of this, the console makers want to extend this "generation" out longer than previous ones. Instead of creating next gen consoles Sony and MS seem to be working on enhancing the current crop with things like this. I just hope that when the next generation does come around that they will be backwards compatible with all the games and addon hardware.

I'm intrigued by how much your post reads like a press release (or astroturfing), but you've got good karma and a low UID so...

The biggest thing Natal has going for it is the continued success of Wii peripherals (as distinguished from plastic non-peripherals like steering wheels and tennis rackets). But Wii Fit and the Motion+ add-on have seen pretty significant success despite a relative dearth of games for those peripherals (so far). This is par for the course with the Wii--first-party titles continue to drive its success--but it suggests to me that users are more willing to pay the price of peripherals if they are attached to a particularly high-quality game experience.

Natal sounds very interesting--certainly it sounds like it has more potential than the Wiimote, the Motion+, and the Balance Board combined. But anyone with any familiarity with the game industry can tell you that listed "confirmed working titles" is a step up from vaporware. The hype around Natal is unreal, and I'm skeptical, and listing committed studios does little to ease my skepticism. Even the demo videos leave me scratching my head, wondering if Microsoft can deliver on half the hype.

I'm happy to be proven wrong. But for now I will continue to echo Tycho's ambivalence [penny-arcade.com].

Reminds me of the Wii that supposedly had plenty of developers on board to make new and exciting games for the then-revolutionary wiimote... we all know how that turned out.

one of the funny things in the natal tech demos i've seen on youtube is how one of the presenters takes cheap shots at the wii's "waggling" of the remote and how stupid and silly blah blah blah... and then watching them arm-waving and making awkward poses to "draw" an elephant (pretty silly IMO) i wonder how much different natal is going to be.

Not that much, judging by the demos i've seen so far. Hope i'm wrong, though.

It's actually quite brilliant. The technology won't catch on if it costs too much- but if it becomes pretty much a standard, MS just opened a brand new venue for games, it's like the 360 is brand new again.. giving them a steady new influx of cash before the next system is unveiled.

For the first time, I feel like MS is making a move on future planning, not just on a quick dollar today. Great move MS. I've always been surprised how well they market the 360 in comparison with the rest of their failures. Zune, anyone?

Keep in mind that I have never, ever owned a gaming console. But the wiimote was, by all accounts, a game changer. Instead of pushing buttons, you moved something you held in your hand. But it's still a handheld controller, and is in some ways a ripoff of a standard game controller - the "only" changes were that you had fewer buttons and you used actual motion of one arm to control the device. And it had a nasty habit of making holes in expensive large-screen televisions.

With this unit, the "controller as a device on your person" is gone. You use actual body movements and voice to control the game, not just the movements of one arm on a unit that still has buttons. Not that this type of interface is totally new, but it is the first time it's being mass-marketed to such a low audience and is made affordable enough that just about anyone in a first-world country could scrape together the funds to get one, and to many this will be chump change.

In other words, this appears to be to the wiimote what the wiimote was to a standard controller - the "next step forward" in making games more engaging.

Of course, if this doesn't work well or is not implemented well, it's going to suck pretty badly. With a basic controller, you push da buttons and if something doesn't happen you either pushed the wrong button or you need a new controller because yours is busted. With a wiimote, you swirl the thing around and if it doesn't do what you want you either moved it wrong or you busted it last time it hit the wall. With this thing, it is potentially reading a lot more data from you, and a poorly designed game could go bad fast.

This could lead to some really clever intuitive games, or it could lead to some really stupid games whose controls make us long for a couple of 4-way buttons on a plastic puck.